A Maltese adaptation of the Boston Naming Test: A shortened version

ABSTRACT

The Boston Naming Test (BNT) is the most widely used naming test worldwide in research and clinical settings. This study aimed to develop a method for adapting the BNT to suit different linguistic and cultural characteristics using the example of Maltese in a bilingual context. In addition, it investigated the effects in Malta of age and level of education on naming performance. The words of the BNT were first translated into Maltese. The test was then piloted to establish target and alternative responses. Naming performance data were later collected from individuals of different ages and levels of education. Only 38 BNT items had at least 70% name agreement. Main effects of age and education were found. A Maltese adaptation was proposed using 38 items and lenient scoring. Similar procedures may be used in other bilingual populations. The study suggests that normative data should be stratified according to age and education.

KEYWORDS:

• Age and years of education
• Boston Naming Test
• Maltese
• naming test adaptation

Acknowledgments

This research was part of a doctoral research degree at the faculty of Education and Health Sciences, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland. The authors wish to thank the publishers of the Boston Naming Test, Pro-Ed. Inc., for granting permission to use the test and for providing the authors with a copy of the test for research purposes.

Funding

The first part of this research was funded by a Malta Government Scholarship (MGSS grant MST 2008–20), while the second part was made possible by means of a scholarship awarded by the University of Limerick, EU Fee Waiver.

Disclosure statement

Financial disclosure: No financial benefits or interests arise from the direct application of this research.

Conflict of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ An earlier version of the BNT included 85 items. The BNT used throughout this study is the 60-item standard form.

² These results reflect the percentage of the population aged 10 years and older who stated that they could speak the language well or have an average ability to speak the language (National Statistics Office, 2014).

³ Language use as reported by the participants; M refers to the use of Maltese only daily, Me refers to the use of Maltese with some English words, and ME refers to roughly equal degrees of Maltese and English, respectively (Ellul, 1978). All participants reported exposure to both Maltese and English daily to varying degrees.

⁴ ‘Cognates are those translation words that have similar orthographic-phonological forms in the two languages of a bilingual ….; noncognates are those translations that only share their meaning in the two languages’ (Costa, Caramazza, & Sebastian-Galles, 2000, p.1285).

⁵ The percentage of participants who produced the dominant word.

⁶ The percentage of participants who produced any acceptable response (the dominant or an alternative response).

⁷ The authors collected data for Maltese word familiarity and age of acquisition (AoA) for all possible responses of the BNT items. Subjective ratings were used. Table 5 presents the psycholinguistic properties of the words in the reduced set. For AoA, the current study used a scale of 1–7, as used by Bird, Franklin and Howard (2001), Stadthagen-Gonzalez and Davis (2006), and Cortese and Khanna (2007). This scale was originally employed by Gilhooly and Logie (1980). For the purpose of this study, early AoA refers to 0–6 years and late AoA refers to 6 years and over. For familiarity, the instructions were based on those used by Stadthagen-Gonzalez and Davis (2006). A scale of 1 – 5 was used, where 1 refers to a very unfamiliar word and 5 refers to a very familiar word. Words with a mean of 1 – 3.4 were regarded as low in familiarity and those with a mean of 3.5 and over were regarded as high in familiarity. Short syllable length refers to words with 1–2 syllables, while long syllable length refers to words with 3–4 syllables.

⁸ The five participants with 0–6 years of education obtained a mean lenient score of 21.4 (SD = 2.41). It should be noted that similar statistical results were obtained when these five participants were included in the analysis, i.e. main effects of age and education, without interaction between these independent variables were also found.

Additional information

Funding

The first part of this research was funded by a Malta Government Scholarship (MGSS grant MST 2008–20), while the second part was made possible by means of a scholarship awarded by the University of Limerick, EU Fee Waiver.